The streets all ripe with jewels.

[Staring at Stars t-shirt and bra, Urban Outfitters + Free People shorts + Sam Edelman booties + Dannijo purse + Low Luv pendant.]

My father wasn’t a big man. He was only inches taller than my mother—scrawny, almost, but strong—with hair that was always a little too long, unless it had just been cut, in which case it exposed a rim of untanned skin across his forehead and behind his ears and along the back of his neck…. He was always doing something, always tinkering or fixing…

He was always working and he always called it play.

“Think I’ll go play on the roof for a while,” he would call to Mother as he went out to patch the most recent leak. “Time to play in the garden,” he would say on a Saturday afternoon, or “I’m going to play around with that carburetor today.” And on Monday morning he would stuff his great, sloppy notebooks into his canvas bookbag, toss a rumpled corduroy sports jacket over his shoulder, and announce, “I’m off to play principal.”

-excerpt from Into the Forest, by Jean Hegland

 

Say what?

Play?

Does this sound as alien to you as it did to me when I read it last night at 3:45am? [After Eli had woken me up by shattering a piece of my Anguillan coral and sending me into a heart-racing panic that lasted for 2 hours?] Work for me has always been viewed through the prism of what I felt my father was yoked with: Leaving before the sun comes up, and coming home long after it had set. Big decisions. A white collar peeking out of a navy blazer, framing a tan neck and handsome face that says, “Yes, I do have a life outside of this place.” Undue stress. Meetings and hours that took him away from my Indian Princesses shindigs.

But I never cared much about the consequences that involved me. I just cared about how he shouldered it, and the examples he set; his approach to work. And I made it my own.

But I have to say: for all I preach, man, have you got to love what you do. A friend of mine recently posted this about how we act in the workplace, and I wanted to write him back and say, “But, dude, have you ever worked in a really self-important ad agency?” Because it’s all about embracing the weird; hell, it might be about fostering the weird. [Nevermind; it’s selling out the weird.]

There are a 100 ways to hate what you do: from when you have to be there to what you have to wear.

But he’s right. And if you have a soul like him, or me, work’s not going to be all that equitable to play.

But I’ll be goddamned if, after reading that passage, I wasn’t inspired to at least approach it the way Eva and Nell’s dad does in my book. I’m loving pushing myself and the work that I’m doing more than ever.

And without work, I wasn’t going to be in this get-up, heading out on my way to eat deep-fried pigs’ ears. So, yeah.

May your work bring you more than a paycheck. I mean that.

-Carey

p.s. this post dedicated to Jessica. You’ll find your way.

Dan Auerbach’s “Goin’ Home”